01 Week
I'm Nancy Valladares, first year masters student in the Art, Culture and Technology program at MIT. I hope that taking this class will help me situate my work within the intersection of art and technology, and at the same time learn fabrication skills. So far the challenge has been getting outside of my comfort zone and trying things I've never done before. I'm excited about the possibilities this will open for my artistic practice.
Final Project Ideas:
For my final project, I hope to let the upcoming weeks guide me in a better direction and to better know the limitations of the media and materials I am working with. I have been working mostly with analogue modes of photography, drawing and sculpture, and looking further at other forms of image making. Surveillance and GIS technologies are of particular interest to me so I'm curious to see if this could be an avenue to explore that.
I'm interested in the ways in which vision, technology, vision and the imaginary intersect with power. I have been looking at reocurring forms in which cameras, or different apparatuses to extend vision have been deployed as tools that replicate mechanisms of coloniality.
My previous experience as a photographer has biased me towards cameras, but I wonder if this could be challenged or expanded in different ways. In what other ways is the potentiality of vision expanded through technology? What are the material and ethical consequences of their deployment?
UPDATE
Thinking about surveillance technology through which processes of power projection and force protection. How this is deployed in places like Honduras to enforce and protect an existing power structure.
Video of DEA Strike in La Moskitia, Honduras.
I was thinking about these technologies and if they could be used to subvert these existing power structures, So I started looking for accessible versions of them.
In a version that might be more symbolic, I would like to create several infrared cameras made out of vessels, and locate them in places around the city where surveillance happens in everyday, maybe public or institutional spaces. thinking about developing this idea more later.